


Society of extremes and madness

by itsneptune



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Childhood Stories, Drabbles probably written at 3 A.M, Enemies to Friends, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mentions of Murder, Mentions of drugs, Police officers, altered carbon au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15686430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsneptune/pseuds/itsneptune
Summary: The stories of three police officers of Bay City.





	1. THE CLONED

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there
> 
> So if you are not familiar with Altered Carbon, it is a Science Fiction Cyberpunk Series from Netflix, that I'd highly recommend (it's got pretty much gore going on though so be mindful of that). I will explain most of the things you need to know but just so you are not completely confused: People all have a device called a stack in their neck. Their minds or their consciousnesses are kept in those and if they die they still exist in their stacks. So if you have enough money, which most people haven't, you can get a new body, generally called sleeve. There can be synth sleeves (which can change appearances) produced or real bodies being cloned or grown. As said, normal people don't have the means. This privilege belongs to the rich, the so called Meths, which also control the whole construct, and the government to a big part. Basically it's a shit world although there are all the possibilities to make it better. I was intrigued by the story, so I wrote these three chapters. Enjoy;)

The First on their team was Chanyeol. He had been the first of them to join the BCPD. That didn't mean that he had a nice youth though, it just seemed he had found himself in the right place sooner. Chanyeol’s parents had been sleeve fighters. Means that if you win a fight, you get a better, renewed fight sleeve, a body trained for combat, and if you loose, which always means you die, you get a downgraded one. Chanyeol wasn't sure if he had ever even seen his real parents, he had vague memories from childhood but he wasn't sure if there were always different people or if they were the same.  
Soon his parents became this or that person, when they came home. No face for Chanyeol to rely on, neither a voice or the familiar weight of footsteps that were always the same when they walked up the stairs. Chanyeol had learned to live with it and he had also learned to live alone. He had always been afraid that his parents wouldn't return one day, that they would be replaced. They could have been and Chanyeol would have never known, because he couldn't get a grasp on who his parents really were. They loved him, he supposed, he said so when people asked him about them and he loved them too, but it wasn't fair what they had done to their son through their job. When he was thirteen he started to demand explanations, he wanted to know why his parents where doing what they were doing. They took him to their workplace, even if they did so reluctantly.  
The Panama Rose Fightdrome. A shady place with a yellow and pink hologram as a hanger, full of mesh wire fences, sandy arenas and strobe lights. Nobody enters or leaves the arena without being seen but Chanyeol and his parents were left alone at first so that Chanyeol could explore. As soon as Chanyeol saw the first freezers he was unsure. But when he saw the creature slumbering within, he nearly jumped back into his fathers arms. There lay, how he was later educated, a fight sleeve, cooked up in a lab and then grown in a synth tank, made for the sole purpose of being the most horrible fighting beast imaginable. There were many tanks, freezers, monsters, humans. Men with teeth in their chest, things that looked stitched together, thorns, claws and horns. And then Carnage appeared. A pale cadaverous face with magenta spikes of hair and a smile that would set anyone sane at a state of discomfort, he looked as inhumane as the beasts in the tanks next to them. Thirteen year old Chanyeol had thought himself to be brave, until the point he had met Carnage. The owner of the Fightdrome, of all this disgustingness his parents were a part of, greeted him with a wicked grin and eyes that had no iris, only small black dots. Carnage took the boy by his hand, of witch Chanyeol nearly cringed away, and he showed him around. Showed him the ranks above the dome made of mesh wire in the middle, the cages for the beasts and the many, far to many freezers. When Carnage sent him and his parents off after maybe an hour, Chanyeol felt sick to his stomach. He didn't talk to his parents for a while after that but he finally started to understand them. They did this to secure his future not because they were supportive of it. When the uncomfortable silence dissipated it could have finally been okay. Chanyeol had gotten a hang of things, he now tried to support his parents.  
But then something went horribly wrong. His dad and his mom fought against each other, how exciting, a married couple, and his fathers sleeve got damaged beyond repair but he didn't die. The Meth they had fought for was feeling a bit extra ostentatious because of all his guests and so he didn't pay Chanyeol’s parents, let Chanyeol’s mother carry his dying father home. And his father had died soon after on their blood soaked couch. He hadn't suffered real death, his stack was still intact but he had no body and they had no money to just resleeve him, if they didn't want to buy him a random. The randoms were for the poor people and if they'd spin him up into a random he might as well come out as an old woman or a crippled. So they would wait and his mother said she would scrape together enough money to buy an acceptable sleeve. Chanyeol knew she wouldn't be able to. And after a month of his mother slowly withering away and him missing his father although he couldn't miss his face or his voice, he made a decision. And so, fifteen years old Chanyeol walked back into the place he loathed most in this godforsaken city and made Carnage an offer. He would work for Carnage when he was older if Carnage would resleeve his father properly. He knew Carnage had the means to do so, even if it were illegal means. Carnage was delighted. To Chanyeol's surprise Carnage told him he didn't need Chanyeol as a fighter, he said he saw some potential for him to be a good fight sleeve. Chanyeol didn't understand at first but later on it dawned on him. Carnage would copy him, clone him and let those sleeves fight his fights. Chanyeol didn't know if it was a sudden burst of humanness or if Carnage truly believed Chanyeol's DNA would make good fight sleeves. Chanyeol was scrawny, tall yes, but not muscular at that time. Carnage told him to go his way and come back whenever he felt ready. The thing with his father would be solved.  
His father did come back and so did his mother who had been a shadow of herself without her husband. Chanyeol was happy but the thought of selling not only his body, his DNA, literally all there was about him save for his soul to Carnage, made him feel a bit uncomfortable. Carnage made up some excuse to his mother that the Meth had finally paid and excused for his demeanor and his mother had believed him immediately. A few years went by. Chanyeol went to school, made his graduation and the day he had to face Carnage again dawned on him. On the evening of his graduation he went to the Fightdrome for his third time. This time he felt ready for whatever was to come. Needless to say that he wasn't. Carnage emerged from the shadows and then led Chanyeol to a backroom, or more like a small chamber hidden behind a wall filled with tape recordings. There stood a very old fashioned clone tank which consisted of two pieces. Chanyeol was advised to lay down in one of them. Then the tank was closed and everything went cold. When he woke up again Carnage and an assistant were looking at something in the other tank. Chanyeol went to see too. And he stared at himself lying in that tank. It was a strange experience, to see yourself breathing calmly under a frosty layer of glass. He could go home now, he was advised, he should come back in a weeks days.  
Chanyeol’s life went on. He chose to become a police officer. It was a decision half made seeing his father bleed out, half made looking at his cloned self. He knew there was much going wrong in Bay city. He started his apprenticeship and got himself a small apartment near his workplace. He went to Carnage every few weeks and it always resulted in another carbon copy sleeping peacefully right there underneath his eyes. More and more it bothered Chanyeol. He never asked what was happening to the clones. They weren't him, in theory, they had his body, not his mind. But he knew some of them were still walking around somewhere. He started to fear walking into one of them on a raid someday.  
It was after years of him regularly visiting the arena, that something out of the usual happened. When he woke up, feeling slightly dizzy and tired, Carnage wasn't admiring the new clone with his assistant, he was looming over Chanyeol, waiting for him to wake up. Carnage told him that this was the last time they would see each other, Chanyeol had fulfilled his duty. Chanyeol understood soon and affronted himself of his ignorance. Chanyeol was a cop, Carnage couldn't afford someone in the police department knowing about all of this. The clone in the tank next to him sat up, staring at Chanyeol with his face void of emotions. Thankfully the training academy of the police had learned Chanyeol something. He swung his foot out of the tank and smashed it into Carnage's side. He managed to escape the arena, Carnage’s laughter and footsteps that sounded like his own on his heels. It wasn't long for his clone to catch up with him, wrench Chanyeol around and setting a punch right into his stomach. Chanyeol stumbled into a little alley. He should have known, he told himself, then the clone had reached him again. Chanyeol tried to block his punches but he soon realized that this clone wasn't completely like him, he was advanced, he was stronger and faster than Chanyeol. Chanyeol had struggled with the identity of his parents, his whole life, now he was struggling with his own. He found it oddly comical when he fell and the clones fist closed around his neck. He thought of his parents. What would Carnage tell them, would he tell them anything? Would they just think that they should have stopped Chanyeol when he decided to be a cop. It's a dangerous job, they do die easily. He struggled for air, but weakly, he wasn't that sure how much he cared, not much though, to be completely honest. His vision started to get darker and suddenly the clone was kicked off him and there was air to breathe again. Then there was this sound next to him and he turned to see his savior, a small man with a buzzcut, vomiting onto the tarmac. Everything went really fast, the clone sunk a blade into the small mans arm, and next thing he knew was that he was staring at himself lying on the street with a knife in his throat. The small man sat there breathing heavily, soon a little to heavy, staring down at the corps under him. Then Chanyeol saw the track marks on the mans arms. He was an addict.  
Chanyeol knew he would be dead if not for the man and it was an easy decision to make when he got back to his feet and scooped the small man up in his arms, still amazed by his survival. He made it back to his apartment with the small man thrashing in his arms. Chanyeol inspected the wound in his arm and as expected he had been injected with reaper, which you know all to well as a police officer. He quickly carried the sweating stranger into his bathroom and laid him down on the tiles for a moment to get his pair of handcuffs from his uniform. He knew the stranger would try to escape coming down from the reaper or whatever. But it took way longer than Chanyeol thought, the puking, the shivering, and the death threats. He wasn't sure if he was being cruel. But he also figured that if he had deserved a second chance to live then why not his savior. Now, Kyungsoo would agree with him, back then, he definitely didn't.


	2. THE ADDICT

The second one on their team was Kyungsoo. His story was different, but no less filled with regret. There were many drugs sold on the streets of Bay City. Every single one of them exhilarating in her own beautiful way and rendered to perfect your rush. You can stop once you've taken one, maybe. But most people just don't want to, they don't want to see the streets that look normal on first glance, but if you look closely enough you will see the dirt and the filth spilling from every crack in those always rain soaked walls, you'll know that evil is lurking in every alley.

And maybe you just don't want to see it anymore, don't want to think about the fact that this miserable world will be your future. Kyungsoo hadn't wanted to know.

It started when he was about fifteen, he encountered a drug runner outside his school. Kyungsoos parents had been pretty insufferable the other two supposed. Kyungsoo never talked about them, not even when he had willingly told them the whole disgusting rest of his story. Kyungsoo had never explicitly explained why he had bought the drugs in the first place but he had started to take Somno after all. Somno made you calm down, gave you a nice fuzzy feeling, numbed you for a bit and it was just what Kyungsoo had needed at that time. But soon, it just hadn't been enough. He had needed more, something that made him feel good instead of just numb.

So he had settled on Veuron, some techno drug that was also common but hit harder than Somno did and left you jittery with energy and just a slightly delirious. And when that hadn't been enough either, when his parents kicked their failure of a son out of their home onto the streets, he had settled on Merge5, a psychedelic, a ripoff of Merge9 wich was an artificial pheromone and serotonin. Merge5 wasn't far behind if you found some clear enough to really consume.

Kyungsoo had only one problem, he was running out of credits. It had happened before but he had just taken his parents' money. When he told them that night in Baekhyun's apartment, when they had all told their stories to each other, he looked disgusted with himself, more disgusted than he had ever looked at any criminal they had arrested. He had nowhere to go and no reason to stop taking Merge5, so he started to steal. He got pretty good at it but as a junkie you're not an active pickpocket since you're out of it at least half of the day. So you still don't make enough money to buy yourself the steadily growing amount of shit you need to keep going. The last thing he could do was selling his body and he did that, even when he just laid there and let people do what they wanted. All he had been waiting for was his next hit anyway, he didn't really bother and he also didn't really remember. He had been lucky to not get killed.

However, one day he woke up in a gutter that he didn't recognize, with a used dose of Merge next to him that could have been his death and scratch marks all over him. He had known then that he had to change something or he would die. But was that so bad? Was it worth fighting to live? Not really in Kyungsoos perspective and so he staid there in that alley he didn't know and waited for the dose to kill him or not to, maybe he would just die from dehydration. But then a man had stumbled into the alley, rather two men, rather two men that looked exactly the same and were fighting. Kyungsoo had sat there and watched as one of them wrenched the other down, pressed him into the ground, his hand around his throat. It was a fight of a person with themselves and it strangely reminded Kyungsoo of his own situation.

Maybe it was this thought that made him stand up and kick the man off of his doppelgänger, only to collapse next to the stranger right after and retch whatever he had consumed last night out. He hadn't been so sure why he had helped the weaker of the men. He hated his weaknesses, he had never hated anyone more than himself. Maybe the stranger on the ground had a personality frag, that crap that only happens when you illegally clone yourself and you go crazy, try to kill yourself or others. The clone he had kicked off had sadly never intended to just let them be. He had sunk his blade in Kyungsoos arm, a blade covered in Reaper, a betathanatine originally cooked up to simulate near death experiences. Bad thing for that clone that Kyungsoo had long passed the point where a dose of reaper would kill him. No, it made him alive, kicked in hard and fast and in a matter of seconds the clone was dead, stabbed with his own blade. Kyungsoo had known he had made a really bad mistake, had known that now, right now, he was through. He would get caught and they would desleeve him and send him into "the dark“. That was what the people called the freezers for the stacks of criminals. Hightech prisons, if you have no legs to walk out you won't walk out.

But the second man, that had still been lying on the ground, he had scooped Kyungsoo up and carried him to his apartment. Kyungsoo had let him until he realized that he would miss his next dose and the reaper started to finally do its real job. He had started to thrash around, started to hallucinate but the stranger hadn't given in, seemingly determined to care for the hopeless wreck in his arms. The next few weeks had been a blur for Kyungsoo. A blur of constant pain and nausea and coming up with a thousand different ways to kill the stranger that had securely cuffed him to a pipe next to his toilet, far enough away so he could get comfortable and lay down and sleep but near enough to retch into the toilet.

At some point Kyungsoo had stopped to even care about the toilet, wanting to make this as horrible for his host as it was for him. The young man had never said anything, had cleaned Kyungsoo and the floor up and had ignored every single admiringly creative death threat that Kyungsoo threw at him. When he had first started to eat the food the stranger brought him he considered stabbing himself with his fork or maybe starting to beg the stranger for Merge because fuck, he felt like he would die without it and he couldn't think about anything else.

After two weeks he had started to think that maybe, maybe the stranger had only tried to save him and was still trying. You don't just go cold turkey on Merge5, it can kill you easily, but the stranger probably hadn't known that.

Week three he had suddenly started to remember things that he hadn't before. As if the sober part of his brain was coming back to investigate on all the disgusting shit he had done while being drugged. The stranger had found him in his corner by the pipe crying his eyes out, and when he came to comfort him, Kyungsoo told him to back off, he was disgusting he said, he shouldn't be touched. The stranger sat down next to him and they staid silent for a moment. Then the stranger had started to tell Kyungsoo his story, starting with his name. Chanyeol.


	3. THE LUCKY ONE

And the third on their team of three, Baekhyun. The pretty guy, they often called him, the men in their devision laughed him off to be too fragile, he probably never even punched someone, they laughed. But Baekhyun was way more than a delicate face, was tougher than many officers in the BCPD station, had lived through things officers usually had laying on their desks as disgusting, unsolvable cases. When he had been little, someone had snatched him off the streets and sold him to a Meth who wanted a pet of some kind, really just something that was young and mortal, unlike him, to destroy, to see the innocence wither away under his fingers.   
For Baekhyun his first real memories consisted of abuse, before that there was nothing, no faces to his parents or brothers or sisters, if there even were any, no names no flashes of insight. He had nothing to rely on, no morals to live by, he was only taught what was wrong. When he was fifteen, Beakhyun tried to escape the clutches of his tormentor with the help of a police officer assigned to play guard dog for the Meth. The man smuggled Baekhyun onto his carrier and flew him down into the city.   
The Meths lived in the big towers, the gates to heaven, above the clouds and the smog, unreachable. Baekhyun, unlike anyone else, wanted to escape this perfect, serene world amongst the clouds. He knew. He knew that the Meths were not what they seemed to everyone else. Beside the hatred for Meths there was also the envy and even the veneration for what they had achieved. They were unreachable in their residence in the clouds. They had their name from Methuselah, a biblical character said to have lived the longest life known to man, who was as invincible and untouchable as them, close to being a god. But they had nothing in common with gods, they had flaws, they were reckless fools, they were monsters. Once, the Meth that owned him had had one of his decadent parties, inviting his so called friends and of course those who where above him. He had booked a pair of certified fighters for entertainment purposes. A married couple, that seem to excite everyone for some reason. They had fought well but the man didn't die. It was a flaw in the artificial weightless forcefield, that had caused the outcome, but the Meth blamed the fighters. Baekhyun had been able to feel the cruel mockery and the evil joy radiating off of the man. He let the wife carry her husband home to die. Gods couldn't be this cruel. They were mighty and they had their vices but they were also just. His owner wasn't and every other Meth he had encountered was the same of worse.   
All his life he had wanted nothing more than to leave this godforsaken, artificially beautiful place. When down in the city, he felt lost in the streets because he never adapted to the life there. He had always been living in a golden cage, even if it was a golden cage filled with snakes. He lived on the streets for some time, finding shelter from the rain with some other hoodlums and drug addicts. But it was like they could reek that he was different, not one of them. So one night they, ratted him out for some credits and he was again snatched up and sold to a brothel where the nightmare started all over. It was like a repetition of his childhood and he hated it, hated to be trapped in a nightmare no matter how hard he tried to escape it, hated that he had no control over anything, especially not himself. He hated everything about the place from the gross graffiti on the wall to the bouncer who’s name he never even learned, to his own glittery but sparse clothing. He knew that he wasn't really living and so he lost every fear of death left in him. That was what he needed to try again.   
On his escape from the brothel that had consisted of straight up smashing his display window with his bare fists and swinging a metal rack at the mentioned bouncer he was run over by a truck. He was just running out into the rainy street, the blood pumping in his ears and his arms spiked with shards. He registered the glaring headlights way too late tried to swerve and ended up stumbling over his own feet. He landed on his blood soiled arms, that one second later, seemed to consist of only blinding pain.   
He lost both of his arms that day, would have lost his entire sleeve most probably, if not that certain Meth would have found him again. He personally flew Baekhyun to the city hospital and payed to buy Baekhyun state of the art limb replacement instead of a new sleeve because Baekhyun was his personal mortal toy, he didn't get to live in a completely new body.   
In retrospective, the Meth had probably regretted that he had not only bought the realest looking arms, but also the best of both worlds combined, cloned flesh over titanium substructure. They looked exactly like Baekhyun's old arms and hands, slender, he even still had this distinctive birth mark on his thumb, but they contained enough strength to punch through a solid wall, brake bones with the flick of a finger or crush a stack in his hand like a piece of sandstone. And Baekhyun took his chance, killed the Meth with his bare hands, not real death but at least temporary, before the asshole got a new sleeve they could place his stack in. He didn't even try to deny it when the body was found. He had needed this, he needed to feel in control if his own life at least once.  
His case was investigated by a police officer who wasn't very friendly and cursed a great lot in Spanish, but she understood him and she made sure that he would finally find a way out of this constellation of misfortunes. The investigators concluded the case as an act of self defense and Baekhyun was set on psychological assistance and, for the first time in his life, had his own four walls. It was a dingy place, the roof was leaking a bit and the wall covering was peeling off, but Baekhyun preferred it tenfold to the golden halls of the suntouch houses. How he had ended up with a job in a police department was unknown to both Kyungsoo and Chanyeol but they didn't ask, neither did they judge Baekhyun for what he had done. There were people working at this station that had done way worse than him, the two others most possibly included. After all the shit he had been through Baekhyun would have been allowed to turn his back on this society but he had instead chosen to take one of the most unwanted jobs. Police was a dying concept when the rotten rich thought laws didn't apply to them and the poor didn't believe in any kind of protection from the authorities' side. But perhaps the idea originated from those two cops who were sadly enough the only two people in his life that had never betrayed him and helped him. They lived in a society of extremes and madness anyways. Baekhyun stood straight and strong next to the other two. He didn't boast about his strength to any of the people laughing him off. It was his secret weapon his 'aces' as he often referred to his arms in front of the other two. So, as small and fragile as he would look next to Chanyeol, he would easily beat him in a fist fight and had been their last resource on more than one operation. He fit well in their team of misfits, he, the lucky one, was the perfect addition to the addict and the cloned.


End file.
